Barriers and Openings for Transforming Swedish Planning Practice–Examples of Landscape and Health Policy Integration

Abstract

This paper examines how key actors think and act in everyday planning practice when new policies are introduced. Drawing on frame theory, an analytical lens is developed for explaining mechanisms that restrain and promote policy-driven transformation in practice. The analysis focuses on current practice and Swedish planning practitioners’ experience of the integration of recently introduced policies on landscape and health. A key finding is that well-established perceptions of responsibility can hamper policy integration–even in cases where practitioners see benefits to planning outcomes of acting differently. Another key finding is that policies reframing landscape and health as holistic and relational can make individual practitioners question current practice, thereby opening the way for transformation.